by Tim Pears
Leo told them he once knew a man in Cornwall whose best friend was a mule. Wally nodded and said that during the European War many mules were shipped from parts of the Empire to the West Country. They were unloaded at Avonmouth Docks and distributed around the counties. Train loads were brought to Wiveliscombe, and sent to local farms.
‘We had half a dozen here,’ he said. ‘Not that these girls will remember.’
‘Of course I remember, Father,’ Agnes said. ‘I wanted to keep one, but you wouldn’t let me.’
Wally Luscombe laughed. ‘’Twas the army wouldn’t let you,’ he said. ‘Once the mules had recuperated they were rounded up again and sent out to France.’
There was a photograph on a wall in the dining room of Wally Luscombe and a blonde-haired, round-faced woman who had to be his wife, and the mother of the three very young girls in the picture. Leo had seen it every time he came to lunch and waited for it to come up in conversation, but it never had. Today he felt bold enough to ask after Mrs Luscombe.
‘It was a canker that did for her,’ Wally Luscombe told him. ‘It grew inside and ate her all up, all we could do was watch her waste away.’
‘I reckon ’tis your ma you girls take after,’ Leo said. ‘Which with all due respect, Wally, is a good thing.’
Agnes said that a photographer had come riding along their lane and offered to take a family portrait for a reasonable fee, and though her mother declined the offer as too expensive Agnes and her little sisters managed to persuade her otherwise. They fetched their father in from the fields while the photographer prepared his equipment in this very room. And now they had this image to remember her by.
‘We have our memories,’ Wally Luscombe said. ‘But what happens to them? They fade. They grow confused inside our heads. This gradual erasure must have tormented mankind from the very beginning, I reckon. That we cannot hold onto our memories of those who’ve died, and then we die ourselves besides. So man learned to draw, and over hundreds – indeed hundreds of thousands – of years, improved until he was able to produce a likeness. But it was not quite good enough. Not ever. Still men strove. No longer with oil and lead and chalk but optics. Chemicals.’ Wally gestured to the photograph with a grand sweep of his arm, that all might look upon it once again, but this time see it not merely as the portrait of this family but as the summit of man’s development. Of civilisation.
Wally tapped his skull. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no museum in which to exhibit our memories. No gallery but that inside our heads … vague, faded. Ha! But now we have photographs. And look here, Leo, we are only one West Country farming family. We have one photograph, taken by an itinerant photographer who set up a tripod over there in that corner and hid beneath a black blanket. Will man stop there? No. Men never stop. Not if there’s money to be made. This be our brack. Our flaw. We cannot help ourselves.’
The girls sat placidly watching him. ‘How long will I remember my Louise?’ he asked. ‘But I look at the photograph, her likeness, and summon her up anew.’
The girls sat, listening, or dozed with their eyes open, as snakes do.
‘One day, Leo,’ the farmer said, ‘every man will have his own camera. He will have a hundred images. A hundred thousand. On every inch of every wall. Our memories will become meaningless. And will men become less tormented?’
Wally Luscombe took up his glass and swallowed a draught of rhubarb wine.
‘Thus spake the godless prophet,’ Agnes muttered under her breath.
‘Perhaps’, Wally continued, ‘the reproductions will themselves be reproduced, ad infinitum. The world will drown in images of itself.’ He chuckled at the prospect.
‘No, I do not believe so,’ Leo said. ‘Man will turn to dust, and everything man-made likewise. The earth will be restored to how it was before.’
Agnes raised her eyebrows and lifted her head, while rising from the table and grasping crockery, as if to say that men might utter nonsense but women had the work of the world to do, as always. She carried the plates to the kitchen.
‘I do not remember our mother,’ Myrtle said. She nodded towards the photograph. ‘Except for this one image. Thus she lives on.’
‘Yes,’ her father concurred. ‘It do confer upon the sitters a certain immortality.’
Myrtle said that now she thought about it, she did not know whether any posterity belonged more to those in front of or behind the camera.
‘The photographer?’ Wally said. ‘Why, I bain’t never thought of that.’
Agnes came in and out of the dining room, gathering cutlery and crockery with increasing abruptness. Betrayed by her youngest sister who’d left her sorority to join with the philosophers. Ethel still sat impassive.
‘Like my father,’ Wally said. ‘He painted that picture of some Highland cattle, an’ ’tis that daub by which we remember him.’
‘We do not remember him, Pa,’ Myrtle said. ‘Us three. Grandpa died before any of us was born. But you could say we honour him.’
‘I do wonder,’ Leo said, ‘if graven images be idolatrous, are memories likewise, in the eyes of God?’
Wally nodded sagely. ‘In the eyes of godly men, at least.’
‘You mean that both images and memories are forms of hubris?’ Myrtle asked Leo. ‘Of man’s arrogance?’
Leo frowned. ‘Perhaps it is a flaw less in man than in God’s craftsmanship. We were fashioned to inhabit the present moment, but we carry with us the past and so can never live in true innocence.’
Wally and Myrtle considered this proposition. Agnes carried out teacups rattling in their saucers. Ethel blinked, and said, ‘My stock live in the present and I must tend them.’ So saying, she rose from the table and walked out of the room.
‘What about our game of rummy?’ Agnes called after her.
The more he saw of them, the more easily could Leo discern the physical differences between the sisters. All three wore old-fashioned bonnets outside to keep even the low April sun from their white skins. Agnes, ashen, blue-eyed, had the broadest, flattest features. Ethel’s were finer, but she was slightly cross-eyed. Myrtle was almost pretty. Agnes, on the other hand, struck him as the sharpest card-player of the three, while Myrtle was surely the least bothered. It occurred to Leo that he’d stumbled upon some genetic pattern, that in female human siblings intelligence declines as beauty increases. Perhaps in males it was the opposite. Then he laughed. What ridiculous notions the brain conjured, with the help of rhubarb wine.
Myrtle asked if he was laughing at her. Not only was it rude, it was also dim, for the conversation had moved on, in case he had not noticed.
Leo said no, he was not laughing at anyone, only at the memory of his old friend’s mule, who used to listen to them talking with an expression that suggested the animal understood and was hanging on every word.
‘Perhaps he was,’ Myrtle said. ‘No one knows how horses reason.’
Leo nodded. ‘I have heard that said,’ he agreed.
6
There was a barrow or sett of badgers in a bank under the hedge on one side of Leo’s field. Each day at dusk they emerged, and set off along their paths. He recalled his brother Sid telling him how these trails could be hundreds of years old, badgers using the paths and the burrows of their ancestors. He watched them trek in search of food.
He observed a badger excavate and consume an entire wasps’ nest, ignoring the stings of the desperate insects that swarmed around. Badgers scratched out bulbs, they ate berries. Their chief diet appeared to be earthworms, of which Leo reckoned they consumed hundreds each night. They could smell insects in the soil. If they found a rabbits’ nest they’d take the young. One night he saw a sow kill and eat a hedgehog.
Some way from the sett the badgers dug shallow pits or latrines, and there they went to defecate. The boars were calm beasts. They lounged around and removed fleas and ticks from each other with their teeth and claws. But as winter turned to spring, with the breeding season upon them, the males began to fight.
&nb
sp; The first green shoots emerged from the soil of Leo’s allotment.
There was much to see, for one who had eyes. One morning he saw two hares in his field stand up on their hind legs and strike at each other with their forelegs. He had heard of hares boxing, males fighting each other, yet he now knew this was wrong. What he saw was a female fighting off a male.
One afternoon at the beginning of May Leo heard the sound of a combustion engine in the distance. He stopped and stood and listened as it grew louder, throbbing and insistent, coming towards the farm.
When Leo reached the yard, Wally Luscombe stood before a tractor. The body of it was painted bright red. It had two front wheels with rubber tyres like those of a car and two enormous back wheels as large as the wooden wheels of a waggon. From these uncovered steel wheels metal lugs protruded, for purchase in the earth. They had left the mark of their passing across the yard. The engine was all enclosed. Wally must have climbed down from the seat and left it running. The machine clanked and vibrated and chugged as it stood there like some beast getting its breath back from some great exertion. The three Luscombe daughters beheld it.
‘Take a closer look,’ Wally yelled. ‘’Twon’t bite. It might run you over, it might run away with you, but ’twon’t bite.’
Myrtle took hesitant steps towards the machine. Agnes was shaking her head.
Wally climbed back up onto the seat and shouted something at Myrtle that Leo could not hear. Wally pressed buttons, pulled levers, kicked pedals, smoke belched out of a slim metal chimney and the machine churned into motion. Wally took hold of the steering wheel with both hands and wrenched it to one side. The two front wheels turned, and the tractor proceeded to chug around the yard in wide circles that grazed the stone barns, its driver laughing with delight.
Agnes turned on her heel and disappeared. Leo followed her to her vegetable garden. She told him that they could not afford the exorbitant cost of this vehicle, and she did not believe they could recover that cost by hiring the tractor and its driver, Myrtle, to farmers round about. Her father liked to give the impression he was frugal, sensible, but when he was set on something he flittered their money.
Later, Agnes brought tea and biscuits to the yard, for her father declined to leave his glorious new acquisition and come inside. He could not shift his eyes from its beauty, though he had switched the engine off now, and was showing Ethel how to start it with the crank handle.
Myrtle sat on the driver’s metal seat, which was perforated with circular holes and resembled precisely that of a haymaker. Leo looked around and saw that one of the horses was not with its fellows out grazing but in the stable. Curiosity had overcome its fear, and it had come to the half-door and was looking upon the strange beast now at rest in its yard.
‘We shall have a tank installed to house fuel,’ Wally proclaimed. He told Myrtle that she would have her first driving lesson tomorrow. Leo ate a ginger biscuit. Ethel told him quietly that her father had been reading up about tractors and their use, extolling their virtues to his daughters, for some time, but none had thought to take him seriously.
‘I’m a modern man, you see, Leo,’ Wally said. ‘I give my daughters the credit. They keep me thinking on the future. Where things are going. How.’ He did not stand still as he spoke but kept shifting beside the tractor and touching it, caressing its cooling metal parts or its rubber tyres like a horseman assessing the conformation of a horse. ‘A tractor can plough a ten-acre field in a tenth of the time it’ll take a team of horses. In the morning you need not feed and groom and harness your tractor, you just hitch what you want to that tow bar there and crank the engine and off you go.’
‘Our father gave up religion,’ Agnes told Leo. ‘He’s become an evangelist for the machine age.’
Wally Luscombe ignored his daughter. ‘And at night,’ he said, ‘when you’re tired from a long day’s work, you don’t have to wipe ’em down and brush off their fetlocks, all dobbed up with mud. You drive into the yard, switch off the engine and go on indoors.’
‘What of our horses?’ Myrtle asked, looking towards the stables, where the one carthorse still gazed out.
Her father dismissed them with a wave of his arm. ‘We’ll sell ’em,’ he said. ‘The knacker’s yard’ll take ’em if no one else will.’
Leo walked into the village for the second time since his return. He stood outside the shop. The shelves in the window to the left of the door were lined with jars of sweets just as they had been when he was a child. Acid drops, pear drops, barley sugar, some fused together by the heat of the sun. His sister Kizzie would order four ounces of one or another and Missis Prowse would break them apart with her wooden spoon, then after weighing them in her scales she folded a square of paper into a funnel and poured the sweets in.
Leo pushed open the stiff, sprung door. The bell rang and a man behind the counter and two customers turned and gazed at him as he stepped inside and let the door close behind him. He nodded to them, then they turned back and resumed their business. The shopkeeper in his stained white apron cut rashers of bacon. Leo walked through the shop. There was a door at the end that led to the bakery, but the door was closed and there was no aroma of yeast in ferment or bread baking. Leo smelled instead cheese, and tea, and paraffin from the forty-gallon iron drum.
Unlike the other reliquaries of Leo’s childhood, the shop seemed larger. Then he identified his reflection in a vast, mahogany-framed mirror on one wall, an advertisement for soap scrawled in ornate lettering upon the glass, in which the room appeared to extend its length again.
The first customer paid and the second, an elderly man, handed the shopkeeper an old beer bottle and requested it be filled with vinegar. The shopkeeper held the bottle beneath the wooden tap of the vinegar barrel. A feeble woman’s voice called out, ‘Make sure he don’t get no more’n a pint.’
Leo saw as he had not before that an old woman sat on a low stool behind the counter. It was Missis Prowse. The left side of her face had collapsed, her left shoulder leaned down, her left arm hung loose by her side. Leo turned away. There were long bars of soap, candles, cotton reels. Packets of dried peas. Tins of corned beef, which Leo had never touched, for he’d heard that it contained as much horsemeat as beef.
The aged customer left the shop with his vinegar. Leo stepped to the counter and said, ‘Give me a twist or two a tobacco, Gilbert, and some papers and a box a matches.’
Gilbert Prowse did not move but frowned and stared at Leo. He wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
Leo smiled and introduced himself. ‘Leo Sercombe.’ He asked what had happened to the bakery.
Gilbert blinked at Leo. ‘They in Bampton come round the village in a bloody van,’ he said. ‘All kinds a bread. Rolls. Buns. And cheap. People stopped buyin off us. Father closed the bakery. Do you know what he does now?’
Leo said that he did not.
‘He drives their bloody van.’ Gilbert grunted a mirthless laugh. ‘Loves it. The only thing he misses is bein warm on cold days. Mind you, he don’t miss bein hot on hot days. Used to sweat like a porker in there.’
Gilbert asked what Leo was doing back home. Leo told him he was visiting, he did not know for how long. He’d been in the war and stayed on in the Navy and then worked up North.
Gilbert nodded. He told Leo he’d lost a lot of his accent. He hardly sounded like a man who came from the West Country. But then he said maybe Leo hadn’t lost it, maybe he’d never had it, because come to think of it Gilbert could not remember ever hearing him speak. Perhaps Leo had only learned to talk as an adult, somewhere in the North Country.
Missis Prowse in the corner chuckled out of the side of her slack mouth at her son’s wit. Leo recalled his sister Kizzie striking Gilbert when he’d made fun of the younger boy. Perhaps he still held a grudge against the Sercombes. Leo paid for the tobacco and left the shop.
Leo walked past the vicarage. A man had climbed a poplar tree in the garden and was fixing an aerial. Anot
her dug a hole. He stopped digging and laid the shovel aside and lifted an old bucket. He sank this in the hole he’d dug. Then he looked up and saw Leo watching.
‘Do it amuse you to ogle a labourin man?’ the digger said. ‘You can join in if you want, I got a spare shovel.’
‘I wondered why you’d dug a hole to bury a rusty bucket, that’s all,’ Leo said.
The man frowned. ‘For an earth wire, a course.’
A man came out of the vicarage front door and marched across the lawn. He wore a dog collar but he was many years younger than the old vicar, Reverend Doddridge. He spoke to the man up in the branches of the poplar tree. Leo walked on. This new vicar was quite likely the first person in the village to install a wireless. The man of God could listen to voices coming through the ether, and know that these were real.
The countrymen sat in the bar. They drank from mugs of beer or cider. Some emptied their mug in one or two draughts, possessed of a great thirst that the ale slaked briefly, and they gasped after each long swallow, a sound of satisfaction.
Others sipped their beer, savouring the taste of the hops, or perhaps not in fact enjoying the alcohol, or its effect upon them, but drinking only because it was the price of being there, in the taciturn company of men. Leo was one such. None knew him. None addressed him. Most if not all would have known or known of his father, but had no way to connect them.
Leo rolled a cigarette. He drank a mug of beer then went to the bar and asked the landlord to refill it. If a world was coming without horses, he sought no place in it.
The sound of wooden skittles came from the alley. In one corner of the bar two men played cribbage. Another thumbed shag into his clay pipe. Occasionally someone spoke, then there was silence once more for a while. A toast was raised to some woman in a neighbouring village who’d recently passed away.
‘I ain’t afeared a death,’ said an old man. ‘My only dread’s of bein buried alive. They think I’m gone but I ain’t, I’s only sleepin, and then I wakes up in a box, under the mud.’